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Web services can be written in literally any language thanks to CGI. I've seen CGI "scripts" written in C. You could write a web-page service in assembly if you wanted.

I believe the most common ones are ASP (usually in the form of VBScript), PHP and Perl. Also notable are Python, Ruby, ColdFusion and Java Server Pages. Common Lisp and Scheme also work pretty well, I've heard.

As for systems... I think it'd be pretty safe to say that a lot of the servers you run across will be running ISS on Windows NT or Apache on Linux/Unix. There are LOTS of others, and one can't really make a blanket statement about it though. You might want to google for web statistics.

Why do you ask, though? The whole point of web applications is it doesn't matter. Google could be written in Befunge, on a system of ten thousand networked GameBoys, and nobody in the world would know or care except the people at Google. As long as it works, use it.

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Great input. I was ramping up an epiphany toward the end of my last page browse to the opening of this post - being your very good point - if it works, why should it matter. And extended input of, use a language that best leverages your code design and essentially, makes life easy for you as a programmer while giving the clients what they want at a best paced turnaround.Thanks for the reply. ^sf.

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Netcraft (http://news.netcraft.com/) can give some information about what a site is running. They also do a monthly web-server survey which currently shows Apache being used by ~70% of the servers and ~20% using MS severs.

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My understanding is that most of the big sites like ebay, google, amazon are running on either Linux or some form of BSD (FreeBSD, NetBSD, etc). So they are definately not using ASP.

I would guess that many of the older sites are using perl, but if you're looking to learn server side scripting PHP is an easy and excellent language to start with. Though as Icefox pointed out, you can use just about any language (though some are more appropriate for CGI apps than others).